Model railroad layouts plans

“Hi Al

My tip is a modified version of a process, for making Z scale pine trees. Instead of twisting wire and chenille fibers in a drill, I got a long piece of a “giant chenille pipe cleaner” (see pictures ) which is 6.5′ long and 1″ (~18 scale feet) in diameter.

My local craft store carries these and it has fibers already twisted in wire. For a 40′ tree, I cut off a piece about 2.5″ long then remove about 1/2″ of fibers on one end to form a trunk.

The cylindrical shape is trimmed with scissors to form a typical pine tree shape then sprayed with hair spray and sprinkled with Fine Turf. Different trimming can vary the shape of the tree, so they don’t all look the same. If it will be seen, the “trunk” can be coloured with a furniture touch-up pen. The process takes about 5 minutes at most.

Hope this is useful to others.

Larry”

“Hi Al,

Thought you might be interested in the layout I’m building. It’s N gauge and modelled after Southern Germany in the 70’s & 80’s. It’s in a purpose built room attached to my wife’s craft room (which is located in a large shed ) with an adjoining door to take advantage of her A/C, and a door to the shed.

The room is 7 metres by 9 metres and I decided to build the layout in an “L” shape. Because of the limitations of the room the main framework was made with runners, made from drywall supports.

Then the actual layout framework was fitted with 16 castors made to take a total weight of 240 kilos. This allows the layout to be rolled forward for access to the back.

The layout consists of three main circuits all interconnected, one with a reverse loop incorporated. The height of the tracks raise from base level to 4 inches. The minimum radius is 15 inches. There are 12 electric points, 2 crossovers and 2 double slips. There will be multiple tunnel sections so infrared detector circuits were made to track the trains through these areas.

From the start of building the room till now has taken just on 12 months. I decided to go with DCC and after some trial and error I came to grips with it. I have a Tomix track cleaning car which is DC and I’d read that conversion to DCC was problematic, so I made the layout to operate on either DC or DCC enabling the cleaning car to be used with a DC loco.

Obviously the DCC locos are removed for this exercise. I made large clearly marked connectors for power supply so there’s no doubt about which power is being used. If you’re interested I’ll keep you informed as the layout progesses. You may remember the chair I made to do the wiring.

Regards

Roger”

I remembered Roger’s chair. Superb!

That’s all this time folks. Please do keep ’em coming.

Beginner’s Guide is here.

Best

Al

Below is a link for the golden key – but first please read below!

Please bookmark this page – or the Golden Key page – so you can always get to it.

Click here for the golden key search box

After you have tapped in whatever you want to search for, look for the arrows at the bottom of the pages to scroll through all the matching pages.

Below, you can see what I mean, look for the red arrow.

Best

Al

“Hello,

Another thing of my friend.

Here is fuel tank from two condensers. Diameter is 32 mm, suitable for 60 m3 capasity tank (H0 scale).

Ladder is made from copper wire. Wire was rolled to square shape, after that it was soldered.

Tank was made in a uniform rush, so my friend did not any photos of process, only ready product. Fuel tank equiped with breather, full size steps – as in original tank. Stand are close to original. Welding seems is made with string and glue.

Best regards,

Andrey”

“Hi Alastair.

I have a few pictures for you. We are new to railroading I am doing the scenery and my DH is doing the railways, I have almost finished the beach scene and that is where I have put the buildings.

I hope you like what we are doing it is a huge layout it is in a room that is 24ft + 24ft and there is only enough room to walk around it. It is a work in progress as you can see from the pictures. We have a mountain that spans the back wall with a cutting near the middle. We also have some N gauge that we will run across the top of the mountain adding depth.

Litacats”

Loved Andrey’s friend’s oil condenser.

A great start from Litacats too – that’s going to be a huge layout.

Please do keep ’em coming!

And don’t forget the Beginner’s Guide if you want to get started on your layout.

Best

Al

PS Latest ebay cheat sheet is here.